CyberGuarder: a virtualization security assurance architecture for green cloud computing

Cloud Computing, Green Computing, Virtualization, Virtual Security Appliance, Security Isolation

V-Cache: Towards Flexible Resource Provisioning for Multi-tier Applications in IaaS Clouds

Abstract—Although the resource elasticity offered by Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds opens up opportunities for elastic application performance, it also poses challenges to application management. Cluster applications, such as multi-tier websites, further complicates the management requiring not only accurate capacity planning but also proper partitioning of the resources into a number of virtual machines. Instead of burdening cloud users with complex management, we move the task of determining the optimal resource configuration for cluster applications to cloud providers. We find that a structural reorganization of multi-tier websites, by adding a caching tier which runs on resources debited from the original resource budget, significantly boosts application performance and reduces resource usage. We propose V-Cache, a machine learning based approach to flexible provisioning of resources for multi-tier applications in clouds. V-Cache transparently places a caching proxy in front of the application. It uses a genetic algorithm to identify the incoming requests that benefit most from caching and dynamically resizes the cache space to accommodate these requests. We develop a reinforcement learning algorithm to optimally allocate the remaining capacity to other tiers. We have implemented V-Cache on a VMware-based cloud testbed. Exper-iment results with the RUBiS and WikiBench benchmarks show that V-Cache outperforms a representative capacity management scheme and a cloud-cache based resource provisioning approach by at least 15 % in performance, and achieves at least 11 % and 21 % savings on CPU and memory resources, respectively. I

CoolCloud: improving energy efficiency in virtualized data centers

In recent years, cloud computing services continue to grow and has become more pervasive and indispensable in people\u27s lives. The energy consumption continues to rise as more and more data centers are being built. How to provide a more energy efficient data center infrastructure that can support today\u27s cloud computing services has become one of the most important issues in the field of cloud computing research. In this thesis, we mainly tackle three research problems: 1. how to achieve energy savings in a virtualized data center environment; 2. how to maintain service level agreements; 3. how to make our design practical for actual implementation in enterprise data centers. Combining all the studies above, we propose an optimization framework named CoolCloud to minimize energy consumption in virtualized data centers with the service level agreement taken into consideration. The proposed framework minimizes energy at two different layers: (1) minimize local server energy using dynamic voltage \& frequency scaling (DVFS) exploiting runtime program phases. (2) minimize global cluster energy using dynamic mapping between virtual machines (VMs) and servers based on each VM\u27s resource requirement. Such optimization leads to the most economical way to operate an enterprise data center. On each local server, we develop a voltage and frequency scheduler that can provide CPU energy savings under applications\u27 or virtual machines\u27 specified SLA requirements by exploiting applications\u27 run-time program phases. At the cluster level, we propose a practical solution for managing the mappings of VMs to physical servers. This framework solves the problem of finding the most energy efficient way (least resource wastage and least power consumption) of placing the VMs considering their resource requirements

Adaptive Mechanisms for Mobile Spatio-Temporal Applications

Mobile spatio-temporal applications play a key role in many mission critical fields, including Business Intelligence, Traffic Management and Disaster Management. They are characterized by high data volume, velocity and large and variable number of mobile users. The design and implementation of these applications should not only consider this variablility, but also support other quality requirements such as performance and cost. In this thesis we propose an architecture for mobile spatio-temporal applications, which enables multiple angles of adaptivity. We also introduce a two-level adaptation mechanism that ensures system performance while facilitating scalability and context-aware adaptivity. We validate the architecture and adaptation mechanisms by implementing a road quality assessment mobile application as a use case and by performing a series of experiments on cloud environment. We show that our proposed architecture can adapt at runtime and maintain service level objectives while offering cost-efficiency and robustness

Heuristic Algorithms for Energy and Performance Dynamic Optimization in Cloud Computing

Cloud computing becomes increasingly popular for hosting all kinds of applications not only due to their ability to support dynamic provisioning of virtualized resources to handle workload fluctuations but also because of the usage based on pricing. This results in the adoption of data centers which store, process and present the data in a seamless, efficient and easy way. Furthermore, it also consumes an enormous amount of electrical energy, then leads to high using cost and carbon dioxide emission. Therefore, we need a Green computing solution that can not only minimize the using costs and reduce the environment impact but also improve the performance. Dynamic consolidation of Virtual Machines (VMs), using live migration of the VMs and switching idle servers to sleep mode or shutdown, optimizes the energy consumption. We propose an adaptive underloading detection method of hosts, VMs migration selecting method and heuristic algorithm for dynamic consolidation of VMs based on the analysis of the historical data. Through extensive simulation based on random data and real workload data, we show that our method and algorithm observably reduce energy consumption and allow the system to meet the Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

Autonomous management of cost, performance, and resource uncertainty for migration of applications to infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) clouds

2014 Fall.Includes bibliographical references.Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds abstract physical hardware to provide computing resources on demand as a software service. This abstraction leads to the simplistic view that computing resources are homogeneous and infinite scaling potential exists to easily resolve all performance challenges. Adoption of cloud computing, in practice however, presents many resource management challenges forcing practitioners to balance cost and performance tradeoffs to successfully migrate applications. These challenges can be broken down into three primary concerns that involve determining what, where, and when infrastructure should be provisioned. In this dissertation we address these challenges including: (1) performance variance from resource heterogeneity, virtualization overhead, and the plethora of vaguely defined resource types; (2) virtual machine (VM) placement, component composition, service isolation, provisioning variation, and resource contention for multitenancy; and (3) dynamic scaling and resource elasticity to alleviate performance bottlenecks. These resource management challenges are addressed through the development and evaluation of autonomous algorithms and methodologies that result in demonstrably better performance and lower monetary costs for application deployments to both public and private IaaS clouds. This dissertation makes three primary contributions to advance cloud infrastructure management for application hosting. First, it includes design of resource utilization models based on step-wise multiple linear regression and artificial neural networks that support prediction of better performing component compositions. The total number of possible compositions is governed by Bell's Number that results in a combinatorially explosive search space. Second, it includes algorithms to improve VM placements to mitigate resource heterogeneity and contention using a load-aware VM placement scheduler, and autonomous detection of under-performing VMs to spur replacement. Third, it describes a workload cost prediction methodology that harnesses regression models and heuristics to support determination of infrastructure alternatives that reduce hosting costs. Our methodology achieves infrastructure predictions with an average mean absolute error of only 0.3125 VMs for multiple workloads

Green Cloud - Load Balancing, Load Consolidation using VM Migration

Recently, cloud computing is a new trend emerging in computer technology with a massive demand from the clients. To meet all requirements, a lot of cloud data centers have been constructed since 2008 when Amazon published their cloud service. The rapidly growing data center leads to the consumption of a tremendous amount of energy even cloud computing has better improved in the performance and energy consumption, but cloud data centers still absorb an immense amount of energy. To raise company’s income annually, the cloud providers start considering green cloud concepts which gives an idea about how to optimize CPU’s usage while guaranteeing the quality of service. Many cloud providers are paying more attention to both load balancing and load consolidation which are two significant components of a cloud data center. Load balancing is taken into account as a vital part of managing income demand, improving the cloud system’s performance. Live virtual machine migration is a technique to perform the dynamic load balancing algorithm. To optimize the cloud data center, three issues are considered: First, how does the cloud cluster distribute the virtual machine (VM) requests from clients to all physical machine (PM) when each computer has a different capacity. Second, what is the solution to make CPU’s usage of all PMs to be nearly equal? Third, how to handle two extreme scenarios: rapidly rising CPU’s usage of a PM due to sudden massive workload requiring VM migration immediately and resources expansion to respond to substantial cloud cluster through VM requests. In this chapter, we provide an approach to work with those issues in the implementation and results. The results indicated that the performance of the cloud cluster was improved significantly. Load consolidation is the reverse process of load balancing which aims to provide sufficient cloud servers to handle the client requests. Based on the advance of live VM migration, cloud data center can consolidate itself without interrupting the cloud service, and superfluous PMs are turned to save mode to reduce the energy consumption. This chapter provides a solution to approach load consolidation including implementation and simulation of cloud servers